Last night's galaxy catch with Esprit 150

[gorann]

Here is last nights catch of galaxies. Managed to get 5.5 hours, which is close to the limit as the nights are rapidly getting very short up here. It is a slight crop (probably around 25% taken away). It is taken with the ASI071 OSC (33 x 10 min at gain 200, offset 30, -15°C) and Esprit 150 sitting on the Mesu 200. Stacked in PI and processed mainly in PS.

Tried for the first time to make flats. I have the optimistic idea that if I keep everything very clean I can get by with only using a master dark for callibration. I still do not think I really need them since I cannot see any dust bunnies in the image and I have no vignetting with this camera and scope combination. In any case, I may have done something wrong since the version I produced with flats was very red with almost nothing blue in the galaxy or elsewhere (although I tried to follow the PI tutorial). So I ended up doing it without flats. With the Geoptic flat screen that I hang on the scope (just bought it from TS), set at the lowest brightness, I still had to do very short exposures (5 ms) do get the histogram approximately in the middle. I am a bit puzzled that the flats had to be so short and the R, G and B peaks in the histogram were clearly separated rather than overlapping - probably not a good outcome.

There are 40+ galaxies in the image with NGC 4559 (also known as Caldwell 36) being the most prominent. Still it is a relatively rarely imaged spiral galaxy, maybe because it does not have the best developed spiral stucture, and is therefore possibly not the best looking one out there. It is a member of the Coma I group in the constellation Coma Berenices. It is probably about 29 million light-years away. Annotation done in PI.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Davey-T]

Very nice Goran, I've spent the last few clear nights hoovering up Virgo / Coma galaxies will add this one to the list.

Dave

[gorann]

2 hours ago, Davey-T said:

Very nice Goran, I've spent the last few clear nights hoovering up Virgo / Coma galaxies will add this one to the list.

Dave

Thanks Dave!

Yes it may deserve a place on your list, should be a good target for you 10" SCT.

[ollypenrice]

Just want you want to see in this kind of image so far as I'm concerned. ?

Olly

[AKB]

Oh, this is great.  The labelled image is also a boon for me, since I caught about the same FOV in a recent EAA session.

 

I shall use your image to see just how many I caught (no comparison, really!)

Thanks

Tony

[gorann]

9 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Just want you want to see in this kind of image so far as I'm concerned. ?

Olly

Thanks Olly, much appreciated!

[gorann]

8 hours ago, AKB said:

Oh, this is great.  The labelled image is also a boon for me, since I caught about the same FOV in a recent EAA session.

 

I shall use your image to see just how many I caught (no comparison, really!)

Thanks

Tony

Thanks a lot Tony! I had a look at your galaxy fest. Very impressive journey you had that night!

[gorann]

Brought out more or the galaxy arms using curves and reduced the green in the dust with SCNR. This spiral galaxy is apparently not so disorganized as some images suggest.